The chips slide down and bounce around, and Drew Carey engages in anti-intellectualism and magical thinking by cheering for the chip to move in a certain direction, which it cannot do because it is not sentient nor is it obedient nor does it speak English.

In the end, you drop some pieces of plastic on some numbers and that's how you win money.

Another way to read this assessment, however, is that Plinko is basically a metaphor for life. It is preparation and luck, joy and pain, love and loss, wrapped into a board that is comically large, oddly pasteled, and covered, for practical purposes, in plexiglass. We walk up to it, step by step, praying it will give us the rewards we seek. Plinko, in other words, is Pandora's Box. It is Joe's Volcano. It is the Oracle of DelphiCBS Television City. It knows all the we are, all that we hope, all that we desire. It gives. And it takes away.

But say, if you ever find yourself so lucky as to be playing a game of Plinko, that you don't want to leave Plinko's power to Plinko alone. Say you don't want to let Plinko's chips fall, as it were, where they may. Say you want to game Plinko's plinkily intricate system.

There are basically three ways to do this. The first is to use math. Plinko, like blackjack, like poker, like tic-tac-toe, is a favorite of nerdy cheaters and cheating nerds everywhere. Because the slot you drop your chips into matters, probabilistically. And so you can play the odds, basically, like this, via the Journal of the American Statistical Association:

Yes. Which is also to say, as you probably already figured, that Plinko "illustrates the binomial distribution, expectations of linear combinations of random variables, and conditional expectations." And this can, if you care about conditional expectations, work to your advantage.

So that's Plinko-gaming-strategy No. 1: Basically, if you're in it to win $10,000, stick to the middle slots. Simple enough.

And here's the second strategy. You can also rig a Plinko board to remove the "random variables" in the equation. [NB: Use this method only for fun. The Atlantic does not condone the actual rigging of TV game shows, particularly when those shows are beloved and culturally defining and happy to reward their contestants with Winnebagos.] This method, should you undertake it, will require fishing line or some other transparent, thin, and bendable material.

First, you remove the plexiglass from the Plinko board. (This will require more than one Plinko-gamer -- the Plinko board, again, being comically large.)

Then you weave the fishing line among the Plinko pegs, wrapping the transparent wire around the pegs and creating a path that will lead a chip down to the slot you prefer. [NB: If you use this method and do not rig the peg to fall into the $10,000 slot, you probably shouldn't be in the business of Plinko-rigging in the first place. Perhaps a rigging of Cliff Hangers is more suited to your talents.]

Got that done? Good. Then repeat the weaving pattern one peg over, all the way down, to line the path of the chip.

Trim the ends of both wires.

Replace the plexiglass.

Await your riches.

This method can go wrong—or, depending on your perspective, it can go wonderfully right. The Plinko board is often carted around for commercials and promotions outside the CBS studio, during which the fishing-line rigging method is often employed to ensure that chips will land in the $10,000 slot. In 2008, after taping one of these ads, producers forgot to remove the wires from the board. The redditor pacifictime told the story of his friend "N," allegedly the first "Price Is Right" contestant to be called to the board after it was rigged.

N ascends the staircase, and drops her first token on the board. It bounces down, around, and holy shit hits the 10,000 in the center! We already can't believe it, we're going nuts. The crowd is on their feet cheering. N drops her second token, and it bounces down a distinctly different random path, but at the last minute makes a beeline for... the 10,000 slot again!! Everybody goes apeshit. Even Drew is showing some genuine excitement. She drops in her third token, it bounces down and hits the 10,000 again, and all hell breaks loose. Everybody's screaming, Drew is literally jumping up and down. She drops her 4th token...

And then the math—the "binomial distribution," the "expectations of linear combinations of random variables," the "conditional expectations"—kicked in. N's three—three!—$10,000 drops were very far removed from the realm of possibility. Producers did not need equations or variable charts to realize this. They interrupted the game. They discovered the wire. They reshot the segment.

They also let "N," however, keep her money—the $30,000 she'd Plinko'ed, plus the few thousand she won from her subsequent, aired-on-TV chip drops.

Which is, by the way, the third way to game Plinko: Be very, very lucky.

About the Author

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.